Sunday, 23 October 2011

Sands of FATE: A pseudo-Arabian setting - preliminary thoughts

So last weekend I began thinking about using FATE to adapt some ideas that had been knocking about in my head, coalescing into some ideas I'm keen to use for a game in an Arabian Nights-like setting, also incorporating some nonsense about elemental harmony from a failed Avatar: The Last Airbender idea I'd had.

So far, I've got an overall idea of a few cities and settlements in a desert, notably the City of Brass and Jannah, the Garden City.
Strewn across the deserts are trade routes, settlements, oases, ruins, and so on. Hidden among all that are blood sorcerers, demon summoners, slavers, and caves full of thieves, bandits and Ghilan (plural of Ghul).

Now, as for protagonists and those they encounter, I've got djinn of four elements stolen from AD&D and modified, so I have Dao for earth, Efreet for fire, Marid for water and Eloi for air. Ghilan might be either djinn of darkness, or a magical experiment run amok. Perhaps something to do with a demon pact. I do like the idea of them being something like a were-hyena.
Djinn would be more in tune with their element, and could function in much the same way as the elementalist archetype presented in Legends of Anglerre. A human would be able to become an elementalist of any element, but then would be stuck with that choice.
An abundance of magic would be faith-based, so minor cantrips might be short words of prayer, a more powerful spell more powerful words or longer verses, and so on. (Orisons? Anyone remember them?)

The overall theme would be that of faith versus corruption, with blood sorcery being a powerful method of magic, but with consequences (such as tearing holes in reality, breaking the laws of faith or some such).
As such, every character would also have a Qarin Aspect, a sort of voice that whispers to their soul and tempts them with impure thoughts or actions. This would function something like the 'trouble' Aspect in Dresden Files.

I'm still toying with some of these ideas, and particularly with a current image I have in my head of a man-sized mandrill wearing a shalwar kameez and a fez. Would I then have other animal-folk that for some reason had been 'uplifted' to more like a man, or stick with the man and djinn dichotomy. So far, mandrills, lions and capuchin-like monkeys seem to be buzzing around my head like this, though I might limit them to NPC interaction.